Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle Reading App. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

Buy Used

$4.34

Comment: Item qualifies for FREE shipping and Prime! This item is used.

Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) is a service we offer sellers that lets them store their products in Amazon's fulfillment centers, and we directly pack, ship, and provide customer service for these products. Something we hope you'll especially enjoy: FBA items qualify for FREE Shipping and .

The Disposable American is an eye-opening account of layoffs in America—their questionable necessity, their overuse, and their devastating impact on individuals at all income levels. Yet despite all this, they are accelerating.

The award-winning New York Times economics writer Louis Uchitelle explains how, in the mid-1970s, the first major layoffs, initiated as a limited response to the inroads of foreign competition, spread and multiplied, in time destroying the notion of job security and the dignity of work. We see how the barriers to layoffs tumbled, and how by the late 1990s the acquiescence was all but complete.

In a compelling narrative, the author traces the rise of job security in the United States to its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, and then the panicky U-turn. He describes the unraveling through the experiences of both executives and workers: three CEOs who ran the Stanley Works, the tool manufacturer, from 1968 through 2003, who gradually became more willing to engage in layoffs; highly skilled aircraft mechanics in Indianapolis discarded as United Airlines shut down a state-of-the-art maintenance facility, damaging the city as well as the workers; a human resources director at Citigroup, declared nonessential despite excellent performance; a banker in Connecticut lucky to find a lower-paying job in a state tourist office.

Uchitelle makes clear the ways in which layoffs are counterproductive, rarely promoting efficiency or profitability in the long term. He explains how our acquiescence encourages wasteful mergers, outsourcing, the shifting of production abroad, the loss of union protection, and wage stagnation. He argues against our ongoing public policy—inaugurated by Ronald Reagan and embraced by every president since—of subsidizing retraining for jobs that, in fact, do not exist. He breaks new ground in documenting the failure of these policies and in describing the significant psychological damage that the trauma of a layoff invariably inflicts, even on those soon reemployed. It is damage that, multiplied over millions of layoffs, is silently undermining the nation’s mental health.

While recognizing that in today’s global economy some layoffs must occur, the author passionately argues that government must step in with policies that encourage companies to restrict layoffs and must generate jobs to supplement the present shortfall.There are specific recommendations for achieving these goals and persuasive arguments that workers, business, and the nation will benefit as a result.

An urgent, essential book that tells for the first time the story of our long and gradual surrender to layoffs—from a writer who has covered the unwinding for nearly twenty years and who now bears witness.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

The essential point of THE DISPOSABLE AMERICAN is that layoffs, or involuntary separations, have become commonplace as a company strategy to enhance the bottom-line with profound consequences to not only the laid-off employees, but to many other parties, including family, community, and the company itself. Three main "myths" are promulgated concerning layoffs: (1) the flood of layoffs over the last twenty years is not indicative of a foreseeable, long-term trend to instability in employment; (2) laid-off workers have lost value and must correct that through training and education, and failure to do so is confirmation of personal shortcomings; and (3) layoffs are no more than issues of cost savings and wages lost with human concerns being irrelevant. These myths capture the stance that corporations and governmental agencies, employment consultants, and the mainstream media typically take regarding layoffs.

But the author rejects those simplistic and convenient myths. He contends that this multi-decade trend of layoffs is a decided break from the employer-employee rapport that existed for the seventy years before the 1970s. Companies are now mostly not restrained by strong unions. Employment-at-will has become the operative policy in lieu of the restrictions found in bargaining agreements that require "just cause" for layoffs. In other words, companies layoff arbitrarily because they can get away with it.

The author is especially concerned about the psychological devastation that often accompanies layoffs that is unacknowledged in official statistics. It is not unknown that individuals' self-esteem is largely tied to their jobs.Read more ›

According to the "Who Moved My Cheese" myth and popular American groupthink, if you become involuntarily separated from your job, there's something kind of wrong with you, or at least your portfolio of skills and/or attitude. You're supposed to buck up, improve your education and attitude, bust your butt looking for a job, and by golly there will be one for you, at approximately your old salary if not a higher wage. This is one of three major myths journalist Louis Uchitelle does a spectacular job debunking through via in depth interviews with laid off workers, CEOs,headhunters and others; labor statistics, and an investigation into the history of the American work force, unions and labor laws.

The other two major myths are:

1. "Payoff" That in exchange for the approximately 30 million full-time workers who lost their jobs since the early 1980s, "a revitalized corporate America will emerge, once again offering job security, full employment, and rising incomes."

2. The dollar and cents savings in labor costs justifies the layoffs.

Rather than recapping Uchitelle's arguments, I refer you to the book which commendably argues all these points, and brings to life the employment situations of blue collar and white collar workers from all walks of life. One chapter that epitomizes our economy is chapter 3, "Retraining the Mechanics -- But for What?" Here we meet a conference room full of United Airlines mechanics, mostly family men in their 30s and 40s, typically making at least $25 an hour who are about to be laid off. They're cheerfully given post-layoff survival instructions including how to deal with creditors, collect unemployment, and retrain for other jobs.Read more ›

The Disposable American is passionately written and and a must read. Uchitelle skillfully debunks a long-cherished American belief that if you work hard, and are educated, you will have job security and/or ease in finding comparable work with another company. The Disposable American addresses the economic challenges layoffs cause for the middle class just as Ehrenreich's book, Nickel and Dimed, addressed those trying to survive in this country while working at minimum wage. Uchitelle makes his points about layoffs by getting close to his subjects and empathically describing their challenges.

The book addresses the negative impact that layoffs have on the financial and psychological structure of the family. This vulnerability adversely affects the community, and increasingly , the economic security of the middle class throughout this country.

New York Times economics reporter Louis Uchitelle has written a vital, sometimes quite emotional book about the polarizing topic of layoffs. While corporate leaders have concluded layoffs to be acceptable business behavior as a means toward increasing the bottom line, the rationale behind such decisions comes into question, and Uchitelle provides a most compelling case against taking such drastic measures. He accurately views layoffs as the consequence of companies intent on nonstop expansion. A longer-term solution against a down market is not even considered, and the author provides substantive data to prove that cuts in staffing do not lead to better stock performance. In fact, what receives much of the author's well justified ire is the myopic aspect of CEOs intent on building the perception that they are proactively responding to business performance. Employees are treated as short-term commodities, while many CEOs not only continue to pad their own compensation packages but also ignore huge non-staff costs that are comparatively more difficult to implement.

Uchitelle focuses on the area that companies refuse to take accountability, specifically the psychological fallout on employees once they no longer are employees and the broader effect on society as a whole. What I like about his approach is that it is not simply theoretical rhetoric that he espouses but empirical evidence that he presents, both historical and contemporary. In particular, Uchitelle focuses on several corporations in Cincinnati, Indianapolis and New Britain, Conn., interviewing the executives who opted for layoffs while continuing to live in luxury and researching the laid-off workers. What he finds out is that there simply aren't enough well-paying jobs with decent benefits to meet demand.Read more ›